Geeks On Wheels

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What started as a race between revenuers and moonshiners in the Appalachian hills 60 years ago has morphed into the glitzy, billion-dollar sports league known as NASCAR, a marketing and entertainment juggernaut rivaling the other major sports leagues.

Now, with mainstream acceptance and a new $4.5 billion broadcast TV deal, fans are demanding more access, more information, and more innovation. So NASCAR is revving up its high-tech engines to give fans new and improved ways to gauge the progress of 43 3,600-pound stock cars as they roar around the track at speeds as high as 180 miles per hour.

In a new partnership with AMD, NASCAR unveiled its first mobile technology center in May, a scoring-command opera-tion that, for the first time, provides enough space to deliver consistent precision and innovation. In the past, NASCAR scoring officials dragged cables to speedway press boxes and created makeshift data posts. Now they have a streamlined plug-and-go scoring center loaded with 40 AMD Opteron processor-based servers and 64 laptops monitoring and crunching lap times, pit-road speeds, and more. (The servers and laptops are from HP.) It took ten months to plan this mobile tech center and another three months to build it, and it has room for planned expansion and equipment additions.

"With the way technology is, we didn't want to have this thing become obsolete in two years," says Steve Worling, NASCAR's manager of IT infrastructure. He lifts out a 3-inch false wall to demonstrate where cables can be dropped in to add more power and new capability. The equipment in the custom-built Featherlite hauler alone is worth $100,000 to $500,000.

It enhances a series of recent innovations, including a trackside decoder-unit system introduced in 2004 that now collects data from every race car on every lap. Buried close to the surface, the system encompasses 24 decoders: 14 around the track and 10 on the pit road. With the new technology center powered by AMD processors and the data loops around the track, NASCAR's computers now churn through 4 million pieces of information per race.

"The whole idea is to make things much faster, more exciting, and more accurate for NASCAR, which then shares it with the fans through TV and everything else," says Bill LaRosa, AMD corporate vice president. Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's vice president of competition, says AMD's innovations will be enhanced next season by a collaboration with watchmaker Tissot to develop improved scoring and timing methods that exploit the new AMD processing power.

All of those efforts may be overshadowed by NASCAR Nextel FanView, a wireless handheld device unveiled this season at race tracks (see the photo at right).

Created by series sponsor Sprint Nextel and mobile-media company Kangaroo TV, it features not only the standard audio scanners that let fans listen in on driver-crew conversations, but a range of high-definition video and live-time scoring updates that sometimes prove more addictive than the race itself. (Nextel rents 5,500 of the devices each week for $50 a day or $70 for a racing weekend, and they have quickly become a fan favorite; later this summer, the company will offer FanViews for purchase at $400 a pop.)

Other features include real-time graphics comparing, say, Jeff Gordon's pace with that of the lead driver and a who's hot, who's not illustration of which drivers have sizzled and fizzled since the last caution flag dropped. In-car camera views are available on the screens too, with everything powered through Sprint Nextel's 2.5-GHz broadband spectrum.

"It's like having digital cable in your hand," says Andy Bernstein, Kangaroo TV vice president for the U.S. "We're so far out in front with this that people just love it. The whole idea is to put cool content out there and let the fans decide what they want and when they want it."-Erik Spanberg, freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has previously written for USA Today, American Way, and The Christian Science Monitor.